When TIME last chose the ten best U.S. dailies, in 1974, it seemed a
buoyant era for newspapers: by publishing the Pentagon papers and exposing
the Watergate scandal, they had recaptured the role as
journalism's leader, which TV had assumed during the Viet Nam War. They
had shown a new zeal for investigating local corruption. And they had
begun to adopt technologies to achieve crisp graphics and photos; a
growing number were using color.

For American newspapers, however, the past decade has turned out to...